Key Terms of Cognitive Topics in Personality
Terms
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- Achievement View of Intelligence-
- Associated with educational attainment- how much knowledge a person has acquired relative to others in their age cohort.
- Aptitude View of Intelligence-
- Sees intelligence less as the product of education and more as an ability or aptitude to learn.
- Causal Attribution-
- Refers to a person’s explanation of the cause of some event.
- Cognition-
- A general term referring to awareness and thinking as well as to specific mental acts such as perceiving, interpreting, remembering, believing, and anticipating.
- Cognitive Approach-
- Differences in how people think form the focus of cognitive approaches to personality. Psychologists working in this approach focus on the components of cognition, such as how people perceive, interpret, remember, and plan, in their efforts to understand how and why people are different from each other.
- Conscious Goals-
- A person’s awareness of what they desire and believe is valuable and worth pursuing.
- Constructs-
- A concept or provable hypothesis that summarizes a set of observations and conveys the meaning of those observations, e.g. , gravity.
- Cultural Context of Intelligence-
- Looks at how the definition of intelligent behavior varies across different cultures. Because of these considerations, intelligence can be viewed as referring to those skills valued in a particular culture.
- Defensive Pessimism-
- Individuals who use a defensive pessimism strategy have usually done well on important tasks but lack self-confidence in their ability to handle new challenges. A defensive pessimist controls anxiety by preparing for failure ahead of time: they set low expectations for their performance and often focus on worse-case outcomes. This strategy overcomes anticipatory anxiety and transforms it into motivation.
- Emotional Intelligence-
- An adaptive form of intelligence consisting of the ability to: 1. know one’s own emotions; 2. regulate those emotions; 3. motivate oneself; 4. know how others are feeling; and 5. influence how others are feeling. Goleman posited that emotional intelligence is more strongly predictive of professional status, marital quality, and salary than traditional measures of intelligence and aptitude.
- Explanatory Style-
- Whenever someone offers a cause for some event, that cause can be analyzed in terms of the three categories of attributions: internal-external, stable-unstable, and global-specific. The tendency a person has to employ certain combinations of attributions in explaining events (e.g., internal, stable, and global causes) is called their explanatory style.
- External Explanatory Style-
- Interpreting the causes of events as being outside of one’s control; the opposite of internal explanatory style.
- External Locus of Control-
- Generalized expectancies that events are outside of one’s control is called an external locus of control.
- Field-Dependent and Field-Independent-
- In Witkin’s rod and frame test, if a participant adjusts the rod so that it is leaning in the direction of the tilted frame, than that person is said to be dependent on the visual field, or field-dependent. If a patient disregards the external cues and instead uses information from their bodies in adjusting the rod to upright, they are said to be independent of the field, or field-independent; they appear to rely on their own sensations, not the judgment. This individual difference may have implications in situations where people must extract information from complex sensory fields, such as in multimedia education.
- General Intelligence-
- Early on in the study of intelligence, many psychologists thought of intelligence in trait-like terms, as a property of the individual. Individuals were thought to differ from each other in how much intelligence was thought of as a single broad factor, often called “g†for general intelligence. This stands in contrast to those views of intelligence as consisting of many discrete factors, such as social intelligence, emotional intelligence, and academic intelligence.
- Generalized Expectancies-
- Rotter claimed that a person’s expectations for reinforcement hold across a variety of situations, what he called generalized expectancies. When people encounter a new situation, they base their experiences about what will happen on their generalized expectancies about whether they have the abilities to influence events.
- Global Explanatory Style-
- The tendency to explain causes of events in terms of very global rather than specific causes is referred to as a global explanatory style. People with a global explanatory style tend to blow things out of proportion.
- Information Processing-
- The transformation of sensory input into mental representations and the manipulation of such representations
- Inspection Time-
- A variable in intelligence research, refers to the time it takes a person to make a simple discrimination between two displayed objects or two auditory intervals that differ by only a few milliseconds. This variable suggests that brain mechanisms specifically involved in discriminations of extremely brief time intervals represent a sensitive indicator of general intelligence.
- Internal Explanatory Style-
- People with an internal explanatory style tends to blame themselves for bad events and setbacks. The tendencies some people have to frequently certain attributional categories when explaining the causes of events.
- Internal Locus of Control-
- The generalized expectancy that reinforcing events are under one’s control, and that one is responsible for the major outcomes in life.
- Interpretation-
- One of the three levels of cognition that is of interest to the personality psychologists. The making sense of, or explaining, various events in the world. Psychoanalysts offer patients interpretations of the psychodynamic causes of their problems. Through many interpretations, patients are gradually led to an understanding of the unconscious source of their problems.
- Kinesthetic Figural Aftereffect-
- In Petrie’s kinesthetic figural aftereffect (KFA), subjects are blindfolded and presented with different sized wooden blocks. One block is a long wedge, and subjects can slide the fingers of one hand up and down the wedge. Using the other hand, participants are presented with wooden rectangular blocks of different size. Participants are asked to fell the width of a rectangular block with the other hand, and slide their hand up the wooden wedge until they judge that the width of the wedge is equal tot eh width of the wooden block in their other hand. The KFA is a measure of individual differences in sensory reducing-augmenting.
- Learned Helplessness-
- Refers to the finding that animals (including humans), when subjected to unpleasant and inescapable circumstances, often become passive and accepting of their situation, in effect learning to be helpless. Researchers surmised that if people were in an unpleasant or painful situation, they would attempt to change the situation. However, if repeated attempts to change the situation failed, they would resign themselves to being helpless. Then, even if the situation did improve so that they could escape the discomfort, they would continue to act helpless.
- Life Tasks-
- Refer to personal versions of culturally mandated problem-solving goals. Life tasks are the problems that people work on solving in their day-to-day lives.
- Locus of Control-
- A concept that describes a person’s perception of responsibility for the events in his or her life. It refers to whether people tend to locate that responsibility internally, within themselves, or externally, in fate, luck, or chance. Research started around the mid 19503 when Rotter was developing his social learning theory.
- Multiple Intelligence-
- Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligence includes seven forms: interpersonal (social skills, ability to communicate and get along with others), intrapersonal (insight into oneself, one’s emotions and motives), kinesthetic (the abilities of athletes, dancers, and acrobats), and musical intelligence. There are several other theories proposing multiple forms of intelligence. This position is in contrast to the theory of “g,†or general intelligence, which holds that there is only one form of intelligence.
- Objectifying Cognition-
- A way of processing information by relating it to objective facts. This style of thinking stands in contrast to personalizing cognitions
- Optimistic Explanatory Style-
- An explanatory style that emphasizes external, temporal, temporary, and specific causes of events.
- Outcome-Focused Strategy-
- for pursuing life-goals, some people turn many situations into opportunities for attaining their goals. For example, a person with academic goals might turn every situation, even social situations, into opportunities to focus on academic tasks. This strategy is used to seek reassurance. Very often, a person who employs this strategy will, when under stress, seek out those persons who, in the past, gave her encouragement and reassurance.
- Pain Tolerance-
- The degree to which people can tolerate pain, which shows wide differences between persons. Petrie believed that individual differences in pain tolerance originated in the nervous system. She developed a theory that people with low pain tolerance had a nervous system that amplified or augmented the subjective impact sensory input. In contrast, people who could tolerate pain well were thought to have a nervous system that dampened or reduced the effects of sensory stimulation.
- Perception-
- One of the three levels of cognition that is of interest to personality psychologists. The process of imposing order on the information our sense organs take in. Even at the level of perception, what we “see†in the world can be quite different from person to person.
- Personal Constructs-
- A belief or concept that summarizes a set of observations or version of reality, unique to an individual, which that person routinely uses to interpret and predict events.
- Personal Project-
- A set of relevant actions intended to achieve a goal that a person has selected. Psychologist Brian Little believes that personal projects make natural units for understanding the working of personality, because they reflect how people face up tot eh serious business of navigating through daily life.
- Personalizing Cognition-
- A processing of information by relating it to a similar event in your own life. This style of processing information occurs when a person interprets a new event in a personally relevant manner.
- Pessimistic Explanatory Style-
- This puts a person at risk for feelings of helplessness and poor adjustment, and emphasizes internal, stable and global causes for bad events.
- Post-Modernism-
- The notion that reality is a construct, that every person and culture has its own unique version of reality, and that no single version of reality is more valid or more privileged than another.
- Reducer-Augmenter Theory-
- Refers to the dimension along which people differ in their reaction to sensory stimulation; some appear to reduce sensory stimulation, some appear to augment stimulation
- Role Construct Repertory Test (Rep Test) -
- George Kelly developed a technique to assess the social constructs in an individual’s construct system. Using a list of 24 people the subject knows through personal experience, he or she is asked to identify how two people out of three in a group are similar, but different from the third person. According to Kelly, after 20 or so comparisons, the subject has generated a list of the most common personal constructs that he or she employs in social interactions.
- Rod and Frame Test (RDF) -
- Witkin devised an apparatus call the RFT to research the cues that people use in judging orientation in space. The participant sits in a darkened room and is instructed to watch a glowing rod surrounded by a glowing square frame. The experimenter can adjust the tilt of the rod, the frame, and the participant’s chair. The participant’s task is to adjust the rod by turning a dial so that the rod is perfectly upright. To do this accurately, the participant has to ignore cues in the visual field in which the rod appears. This test measures the personality dimension of field dependence and independence.
- Social Constraint-
- A strategy for pursuing life tasks. A person using this strategy overcomes his or her anxiety by taking the lead from other people
- Specific Expectancies-
- Recent researchers have developed specific locus of control scales for specific categories of events. This approach is referred to as specific expectancies, where the emphasis is on the locus of control in discrete areas of life, such as health locus of control.
- Specific Explanatory Style-
- An aspect of explanatory style, referring to attributing the causes of events to specific, rather than global causes.
- Stable Explanatory Style-
- When bad events happen, some people tend to think that the cause of such situations are permanent, that the causes are stable and long lasting.
- Strategies-
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Characteristic ways that people respond to the challenges of making progress on a particular life task.
Unstable Explanatory Style- When bad events happen, some people tend to think that the causes of such situations are not permanent, that the causes are unstable and temporary. - Unstable Explanatory Style-
- When bad events happen, some people tend to think that the causes of such situations are not permanent, that the causes are unstable and temporary.